Destination of the Month: Paris

I have only been to Paris in the summer. When the Champs Elysees is crowded with tourists looking for a bit of shade for relief from a relentless sun. When you decide to save yourself from the metro crowds by walking everywhere until your sandals smell so bad you throw them out rather than ruining everything in your suitcase. When you can spend long evenings watching the sky turn the stone white edifices rose from Montmartre Butte, the Sacre Couer at your back, a bottle of wine on hand, or dance the summer evenings away on the banks of the Seine.

I’ve never been to Paris in the winter, but I can imagine the lamp lit streets and bridges, the snowflakes melting softly into the Seine. And Paris is a city that is always in someways more imagined than experienced, half romance half real. This month, we’re celebrating the city of light with some lovely gift books–for the traveler who has been and wants to remember those fading summer nights, or for someone who is on their way to the sparkling snow-covered boulevards. And for the rest, there are narratives to help you imagine the trip you’ve never taken but someday will.

Flipping through Paris: An Inspiring Tour of the City’s Creative Heart is almost as good as a ticket there. JanelleMcCullough takes the traveler through eacharrondissement by way of gorgeous photographs and alluring prose. This book is coffee table and guide book in one. Looking for something more compact and practical? We have two shelves of guidebooks devoted to helping you navigate the city. Secret Paris, for example, can unlock the city and show you un-looked for corners.

Paris is a city full of stories, imagined and real. Paula Mclain has taken the well-known classic story, A Moveable Feast, and turnedHemingway’s memoir of 1920s Paris into a novel. This time, however, the women speak. The Paris Wife is told from the point of view of Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley Richardson. She narrates the well-known story: from falling in love, to meeting other members of the “Lost Generation” to the final heartbreaking betrayal.Hungry for more stories set in Paris? The NYRB has collected Mavis Gallant’s Paris Stories into one brilliant edition. This would be the perfect read for your flight to France.

And finally, the slim The Night Before Christmas in Paris makes a sweet stocking stuffer for the francophile in your life. Santa Claus is frantic because Mrs. Claus has slipped off to see the sites of Paris. Santa’s sleigh visits the Montmartre, the Left Bank, the Notre Dame, the Ritz in search of his wife. In the end, “His memories were sweet of the City of Light,” as we hope everyone’s are this holiday season, and, of course, to all a good night!

My Way or Norway, or; Tied Up in Knuts

Knut Hamsun is considered one of Norway's most important writers. He's not read very widely in the US despite Hemingway's claim that "Hamsun taught me to write." But Hamsun was a hugely prolific author and one of only 11 Norwegian Literature Nobel laureates. His books are spare, taught, with deep characters and lush Nordic atmospheres. It sounds oxymoronic but he is really worth reading to understand what I mean.

Just this last week the UBC coincidentally acquired several of the few novels of Hamsun's translated into English from different customers throughout the week. Get a foothold in Norwegian literature with Hamsun, or discover a new writer. There are many points of entry and no two of his novels are alike.

Here are the ones in stock this week:

A perennial Hamsun favorite; considered his masterpiece by the Nobel committee. Chock full of Norwegian landscape it is the story of man in nature told through a village of homesteaders at the turn of the 20th century.

A masterpiece of existentialist literature. A man wanders the streets of Oslo starving himself in order to fuel his experience and creativity. Haunting, creepy, like staring into the gaping maw of an Edvard Munch painting or reading a depressing Kafka story turned grotesquely realistic.

One of those heartbraking love stories where the poor young man is in love with the wealthy girl, but she is expected to marry into her own social caste while he works desperately to make something of himself.

A mysterious stranger moves into a shack near a village. He lives a solitary life with his dog until a village girl wanders by. They fall in love but neither knows the other's feelings. A bittersweet modernist fable.

Protagonist Ove is a drunk, a womanizer, an incorrigible. His interactions in the microcosmic world of his Norwegian fishing village occupy this slim, humorous novella.

Home on the Range

I'm taking vacation next week so that means you're not going to get one PEEP outta me next week. What should you do while you wait with baited breath for tales from the UBC? How about reading some of these books that evoke for me, a native Idahoan, the land of her birth to which she shall travel. Talking about myself in third person is weird.

The most recent book I read set in Idaho was Dennis Johnson's Train Dreams. A tiny little novella epic in scope, it is set in the untamed and the remote wilderness of northern Idaho as the railroads are built toward the coasts. It kinda made me a little homesick. I even craved huckleberries (they grow rampant throughout Idaho) though I never had a taste for them when I lived there.

Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping and Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose are both set in Idaho. Anthony Doerr spent some time there and there are a couple of short stories in The Shell Collector set in Boise, my hometown, that are really well done. Ezra Pound was born in Hailey and Hemingway went there to hunt and then die. We are a hardscrabble folk with a humble literary history, or something, but one book we acquired in the UBC last week really reminded me of home:

But what will I actually read on the plane? Dune by Frank Herbert. He was from Tacoma, and I'm also visiting my adopted hometown of Seattle. And Idaho is famous for its Bruneau Sand Dunes, so it totally makes sense. I'll have 20+ hours on a plane and my water bottle on me at all times just as I had an ice cream sammich on me at all times reading The Hunger Games.

So I'll catch you soon, Boise. I shall eat Flying Pie pizza and Idaho Spud candy and see my toddler niece who was a tiny newborn raisin when last I saw her but now walks, talks, and brushes her own long, glorious golden locks. And Brookline, take it easy on Carl next week while he flies solo. Bring him lotsa Coca-Colas and steak burritos.